Last weekend a good portion of XC Ottawa was up in Duntroon for the Noram races. The races were also divided into a university category, so most of the team went as the Carleton Crew, with the exception of Matthias and Katie who tagged along for the ride. Thanks very much to Carleton Athletics who got us a massive bus to drive down in with some swanky appartments at the bottom of Blue Mountain, almost felt like we were on the Tour de Ski.
The weekend started with a classic sprint on Saturday and finished with a 15km skate race for the men and a 10km for the women on Sunday. The skate leg of the weekend was grueling course with many large hills.
We got to Duntroon Friday afternoon after getting up at an early 5 in the morning and leaving from Carleton Athletics in our large bus. 6 hours later and some good napping we were at the race courses to go for a warm up ski on the sprint course. After a couple short laps with a couple sprints we headed to our accomodations under Blue Mountain where our coach/chef was preparing an amazing meal for us. Two nights of amazing food, fun racing and a great team to hang out with made it hard to come back to the real world. So thank you very much to Carleton for sending us on that awesome trip and thanks to your coaches Chris, Rob, Mike and Bella for giving us awesome skis and making it an all around easy weekend for us.
Kyle making it hurt in the classic sprint.
Andre striding up the last bit of the hill.
Lee going over the last uphill, checking how much of a gap he has.
Ingrid cresting the hill.
Liza going over the last hill.
I only got pictures from the university classic sprint heats, but the rest of the team had some strong results in the other portions of the weekend. Matthias qualified to race quarter finals in the open category in the sprint day and finished 36th on the 15km skate day. Katie also just missed qualifying on the sprint day, coming in 18th when the category was shorting to 16 people going through. Peter, Lee, Kyle and Andre all also had strong results in the university category distance race finishing 1st, 3rd,7th and 8th respectively. On the women's side Liza, Kyla and Ingrid all had very strong results in the university category finishing 4th, 5th, and 8th respectively.
For more distant results: http://zone4.ca/results.asp?id=5357
For more sprint results: http://zone4.ca/results.asp?id=5347
It was a fun race weekend in Duntroon, now were all looking forward to Easterns in Ottawa.
Enjoy the skiing!
"Clean Oxygen Fed Sports Films"